All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Navigation

The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Without JavaScript enabled, you might want to
use the classic discussion system instead. If you login, you can remember this preference.

Please Log In to Continue

So I can't take credit, but he pointed out that this article didn't really address Paul Graham's points:

In particular, Graham claims that terser languages are more powerful [paulgraham.com], because studies have shown that coders churn out a pretty constant number of lines per day, regardless of the programming language. Java is anything but terse.I could go on, particularly since the Sun JVM isn't open source, and Graham makes a point of claiming that Great Hackers prefer to use open source tools. I thin

It's not fair to blame Java for a bad library. This is a foolish criticism.

I don't entirely agree. One of the often cited reasons for using Java in the first place are the cross platform GUI libraries (SWT being the other). This is not a third party library - it's effectively a core library, made by the Java folks for the Java folks. If it sucks, then it taints Java as a whole, and might make you regret ever using Swing in the first place.

By that argument, you can criticize Perl because, let's face it, though CGI.pm is incredibly useful and recommended, both the code and the interface leaves much to be desired (as Lincoln Stein readily admits.) There are plenty of other "core" modules -- made by the Perl folks for the Perl folks -- against which one could make a similar criticism. Whether or not these libraries are well designed has nothing to do with whether or not Perl is well designed.

By that argument, you can criticize Perl because, let's face it, though CGI.pm is incredibly useful and recommended, both the code and the interface leaves much to be desired (as Lincoln Stein readily admits.) There are plenty of other "core" modules -- made by the Perl folks for the Perl folks -- against which one could make a similar criticism. Whether or not these libraries are well designed has nothing to do with whether or not Perl is well designed.

Java is verbose, pushed by totally uncool corporate goons, and not open source. Duh. However, Graham's criticisms, while funny, are almost completely wrong. There are lots of good hackers using Java, and all you need to do to see this is look at the open source Java community. There is a willingness among them to admit that some problems are actually complex and are not best solved by writing three lines of code (often in a bizarre newly-invented syntax). I find this acknowledgement somewhat lacking am